7k-year-old well is the oldest wooden structure ever discovered

A city that's 200 years old today is "young" by human standards; even civilizations (cultural shapes) a thousand years old have probably only gone 10% of the temporal distance since the first settlements.

I sometimes wonder how our current present could possibly be seen by people 7,000 years from now in the future (well, I tend to stop at 1,000 because it's already too big, but contemplating 10,000 or 100k even is humbling). There's this sense that we would be "ancient" to them, a different world. That most of our preoccupations would be long solved, and that only a few memes of our culture would remain to their day. To wonder if, in the grander scheme of things, we're "empty" like so many times before us and will leave pretty much nothing substantial, or if we're "decisive" like those ideas and people and eras that shaped civilization as we know it today.

Would future eras see our computers and AI-attempts as foolish delusions like some people thought vapor machines could solve everything? Would our cars and planes and trains be seen as a temporary means of transportation that only lasted a couple centuries before something much better, much more "obvious" would take place? When would we escape Earth and grow beyond, is it for this century or much later, would it even be a done deal by 3,000? What new science lies beyond us in time simply because we just can't see it now, and yet we could actually make now if we just thought of it? (like we could have invented electricity in Ancient times, but conversely Einstein's GR was a gift from the Gods because it was at least 100 years too early in refinement). How much of what we take for granted is actually debatable or plain wrong; how much of what we doubt today is actually true, the right intuition? When do we eventually cease to be "homo sapiens sapiens" because too many mutations is too many and we've become something else? How much of "something else" is of our own doing (volition, objective) though genetics, epigenetics, culture? Etc., etc., etc.

I find that far from being sterile or futile, these are extremely valuable thought experiments because they let us break our current mold and observe things from an arbitrarily different (call it "weird") standpoint. They let us re-imagine the past and unfold it differently, thus see many futures — and as always, plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

Moreover, 5259 BC is roughly as long before the extinction of those mammoths as that is before the present day.

I find Tim Urban’s post on time scale to be similarly eye opening and thought provoking:

https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.h...

I think part of it is that we operate on a different timescale now.

We are used to being able to build big things quickly, or make things that require precise machining quickly. And so of course we can also build small things, or make less sophisticated things, even quicker.

If it would take a lifetime to build something or make something, we don't do it. Pretty much everything we need can be done way quicker than that.

We forget that for many of these things what makes them difficult is the doing them quickly part. If you are willing to take decades or even lifetimes, those things can be done with much simpler technology than we are using.

For example, I remember reading about some sort of geared mechanism from a couple thousand or more years ago. I don't think it was the Antikythera mechanism, but I don't remember for sure. Anyway, it had gears to a precision that was not seen afterwards until something like the 15th or 16th century, and so many people wonder how such ancient people could have produced such a thing.

But precise gears aren't hard if you have time. All you need is some kind of fine file that can work on the metal you want to make your gears out of, and someone who can spend a lot of time doing a "file a little bit/check the fit" loop.

You might need a workforce of 100 apprentices working for a lifetime to make something this way, and so those things are are. We see the scarcity of such items in the archaeological record, and unjustly assume it is because they didn't know how to make them.

Now we still have members of society that share in this innovation, but I am curious if we're down to 0.00001% of society that really thinks through things vs just being handed bread and work.

"Neolithic peoples behave as expected" is hardly a good headline - and though I don't know much about archeology, it seems like archeologists would be scientific enough to not attribute behaviours and technologies to Neolithic cultures for which there was no evidence.

Considering as well that the past is poorly documented (especially wood), discovering something not already known may be easier than we think.

US Census estimates that there were 5-20M people 7,000 years ago. People tend to settle in similar places, so the stuff left over tends to disappear in normal circumstances.

I don't think it likely, but like the article says, we wouldn't have any clue if there were.

Likewise, if our civilization collapsed, and in the far future another advanced civilization arose on earth, they wouldn't have a clue about us if enough time had passed.

Normally, one uses advanced carpentry techniques to look nice, or to make it strong and light. None of those are a restriction at the bottom of a well - Why not just use a thicker bit of wood and a basic unpinned miter joint held in place by soil?

When you're carving wood by hand, why go to the extra effort of fancy complex joints for no gain?

I think it’s prudent to only assert what we believe we have enough evidence to assert with commensurate certainty.

Surely that means we’ll underestimate historic abilities and skills but it’s better than presume things based on “no-evidence” because then it’s speculation without ground facts.

It's easy to see that this is still true today. Not everyone is living a first wold life. India may have a billion people but they aren't anywhere close to the living standards in USA or Europe.

There's also the issue that, as long as our research isn't too shoddy, it's sort of unidirectional. Once you have found an example of Neolithic groove joints or whatever, you've established that at least some people at the time could make groove joints, even if you didn't think they could before. Going in the other direction would require showing that the original research was Piltdown-Man-style fakery or something.

What's a bit more incredible to me is that they have 7000 years of unbroken samples of wood from that one area? I know you can corroborate with other dating methods but the headline here is that this is pure dendro?

Also, with dendrochronology, surely we have to have other artefacts (wooden pieces at least) that are dated only just later from the same area (ie planted before these timbers were cut) -- be interesting to know what they are?

Other more complicated dating techniques like radiocarbon dating and ice cores are too abstract or complicated, and therefore easier to hand wave away as containing too many unprovable assumptions. For instance, serious YEC people like to point out that we're assuming that the speed of light or radioactive decay rates were constant in the recent past. If it seems insane to cling to bad arguments like this, welcome to the world of science-minded YEC people.

But tree rings... everyone has seen tree rings, and everyone knows that sometimes they're thicker and sometimes thinner. That's hard to argue away. The YEC camp tries: they point out we're assuming there's one ring per year. But when I realized that this really was their best argument, I had to give up YEC and find out how deep the rabbit hole went. About a year later, I was an atheist.

Unfortunately, what we all learn is true to the facts but what the local authorities is important. It is not surprising at all that some communities that lean heavily in to religion may choose to say anything BC is Pagan, uncultured, etc.

The journal article about this discovery [1] gets to the point right in the first sentence:

> In 2018, during the construction of a motorway in the East Bohemian Region near the town of Ostrov (Czech Republic), archaeologists excavated a structure of a wooden water well lining with a square base area of 80 × 80 cm and 140 cm in height.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030544032...

When, what, where and how all addressed right from the start.

I guess "Central Europe" is a term only used by people who consider themselves "Central European", everyone else seems to only distinguish between east/west.

Geographic clustering is always slightly arbitrary, but in American parlance "Eastern Europe" and "Western Europe" are used dichotomously, and with the former usually corresponding to erstwhile Warsaw Pact members.

Czech Rep. is as far east as Austria, and I dont think anyone would question Austria being part of traditional central Europe. I'd think that Hungary and Poland are usually considered the same - just depends on how strongly their cultures were affected by the old iron curtain.

Not to be confused with the West Coast, no one would think that because it doesn't have a coast. But relative geographical terms are, well, relative.